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When backing up the c drive, wouldn't one want to also BU the factory recovery partition also, to still be able to have this feature in case the HDD actually crashed and had to be replaced?

Sure, and you also MUST backup the 100MB system partition. But both you really need to backup only once because they never change.

That's what I thought, some people forget about these two partitions when they BU their c drive they think it includes all of their data on the HDD. I know because this happened to me. I BUed my c drive via Paragon B&R every week then my HDD crashed, I put in a new one and it restored the snapshot without any problems. everything was there, except the system & recovery partitions.

I really did not need the partitions because, I had all disks including drivers that came with the computer. Still would have been a good idea to back up those two partitions though. Just thought I would mention this for others who forget about these partitions.

When backing up the c drive, wouldn't one want to also BU the factory recovery partition also, to still be able to have this feature in case the HDD actually crashed and had to be replaced?

I think it is a good idea. One of my older PCs is an ACER and I imaged the recovery partition. If your HDD fails you can reimage it along with your system reserved and OS partition. This is more of a personal preference since good images of sys reserved and the OS partition are probably all you'll end up using.

Hi. I have a Dell laptop, and the HDD has 4 partitions:
- Dell system recovery
- System Reserved (active) - NTSF
- C:\ - NTSF
- D:\ Dell Always ON Reader (as silly UNIX based partition that Dell includes as a fast-start up option)

Years ago I tried Macrium & my backups always failed. Recently, I found out that this may be because the Dell partition is FAT16 formatted. If I read the forums right, this partition only has the factory settings, so if I were to recover my system all I need is the "System reserved" partition and the C:\ partition, correct?
I don't understand what the purpose of the Factory default partition is...
Thanks!

This is a strange setup for Dell. I have 2 Dell systems and each one had the bootmgr (active partition) in the recovery partition. I moved the bootmgr to C. And that Fat16 partition I have never heard of. Very strange.

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